Luis Ibáñez works as Senior Software Engineer at Google Inc in Chicago. Opinions expressed in this site are his own.You can find him in github at: http://www.github.com/luisibanezand in twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/luisibanezHe previously worked as a Technical Leader at Kitware Inc., and Director of Open Source Community Development at the Open Source EHR Agent (OSEHRA). At Kitware he was closely involved in the development of open source software for medical imaging applications, in particular, working with the Insight Toolkit (ITK).Luis is a strong supporter of Open Access, and one of the editors of the Insight Journal, an OA Journal that enforces the verification of reproducibility. In collaboration with other instructors, Luis taught a course on Open Source Software Practices at RPI between 2007 and 2013, and also at the State University of New York at Albany between 2011 and 2014.Luis Ibáñez received a B.S. in Physics from the Universidad Industrial de Santander (Bucaramanga, Colombia) in 1989 and a M.S. in Optics from the same university in 1994. He received a D.E.A and Ph.D. degrees from the Universite de Rennes I (Rennes, France) in 1995 and 2000, respectively. In 1999, Luis Ibáñez joined the Division of Neurosurgery of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and participated as a member of the MIDAG and CADDLab groups. His work at UNC was related to the development of algorithms for 2 and 3D registration applied to image guided surgery. He also participated as developer of the INSIGHT Registration and Segmentation Toolkit sponsored by the National Library of Medicine. Luis Ibáñez joined Kitware, Inc. in February 2002 where he was one of the main developers of the Insight Toolkit (ITK) coordinating its maintenance with other developers and the user community; he is also one of the main developers of the Image Guided Surgery Toolkit (IGSTK) and participated in crafting the operational principles of the Insight Journal. Luis Ibáñez is a strong supporter of Open Access, and the verification of reproducibility in scientific publications and is a regular speaker in ITK training courses, and in events disseminating the principles of Open Source. In August 2014, Luis joined Google Inc as Software Engineer, to work with the corporate engineering team in New York city.
Authored Comments
Very concise comment AC,....but no,
that's not a good summary of what this article is about.
The article describes an initiative to make educational resources available to the public all over the world.
"...harnessing the connective power of technology to give as many people as possible access to the highest-quality learning materials is a good idea whose time has come..."
This is what the Wikipedia is about, what Khan Academy, TED, OpenCourseWare, the Open Access movement, and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), are all about:
"Making Education available to Everyone"
Why does it have to be free for people to access ?
Because imposing any price to access it will raise barriers that will prevent these resources from reaching their final destinations. We are talking about making education available to individuals who live on less than $1 a day, sometimes much less than that. They, I assure you, do not have credit cards.
This doesn't mean that it is Free to create and produce these resources. There is certainly a cost to it, and here is where understanding basic concepts of Economics is important. I do get paid for preparing college level classes. Once I have prepared a college class, and recorded it in Video, it cost the same to let 100 people watch it, than to let 10 million people watch it. Therefore, at that point, imposing restrictions to its distribution is actually a waste of the resources that were invested in creating the materials in the first place.
We *already* invest the resources needed to create these materials, since we *already* teach those courses anyway. In fact, I have to interrupt my weekend of creating online materials for a Databases and a Web Development classes at college level, in order to address your comment here.
Why does it have to be available in Arabic?
Because Arabic is spoken as a first language by more than 280 million people, and as a second language by another 250 million.
The fact that the resources are made available in Arabic is simply a matter of making them accessible to people in their native languages, instead of expecting them to be fluent in English.
These same resources are being translated to many other languages. Just as the Wikipedia is available in 285 languages:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
Khan Academy videos have been translated to more than 20 languages (including Farsi, Arabic, Greek, Spanish, Polish and Mandarin ).
http://www.youtube.com/user/KhanAcademyLanguages
TED Videos have been translated (by volunteers) to more than 100 languages:
http://www.ted.com/translate/languages
One can not expect that an 8 years old girl in Ecuador, will be fluent in English, and therefore exclude her from high quality education, just because we imposed an artificial language barrier on the resources that we publish online.
English is the native language of only 5% of the world's population:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers
The world is a much more diverse place than what we tend to think.
Finally,
Labelling Education as "leftist propaganda" is quite simplistic, and it is propagandistic in itself.
Let's not forget that Education is a Human Right, not a privilege to be reserved only for English native speakers who carry credit cards.
We have come a long way, we are not in the 1950's any more, the cold war is over. We now live in a networked world where Economics are based on services, and knowledge-based production. Here and now, having Education available to every one is essential, and Openness is the Economically Smart way to get there.
Bill,
Thanks for a great article, and for raising awareness about Open Data Day. Your timing is perfect, since we are one week away from this important international event.
I have a great interest in Open Science, as do many of my coleagues at Kitware. We will love to contribute to the course on P2P.
In particular, we have been strongly promoting the adoption of practices for enforcing the verification of reproducibility, which is one of the benefits of Open Science.
Look forward to work together this Saturday Feb 23rd on Open Data Day.
We will be hosting some hands-on activities at SUNY Albany
http://wiki.opendataday.org/ALBANY2013